Less Time Than You Think
by Zerepak
Summary: "It's further than it looks, and time is short." These were the only words that ran through her head as the white walls around her blurred at this unexpected news. A few words had become familiar over the past few weeks. Words like: Malignant. This word is derived from the Latin term for 'bad'. A malignant brain tumor was her final battle. One she couldn't win. SxJ.
1. The News

It's further than it looks, and time is short.

These were the only words that ran through her head as the white walls around her blurred at this unexpected news.

Silence filled the room for an excruciating moment as the doctor spewed words that had become familiar over the past few weeks.

Words like: Malignant.

This word is derived from the Latin term for 'bad'. A malignant tumor.

Inoperable was another word she'd decided not to like. Sarah had always been under the illusion that cancer could kill anyone else but her. Her stepmother had endured chemotherapy for breast cancer, but she merely surgically removed the tumors and had perky implants put in her natural breasts' place.

For Sarah, it was a whole new ball game. There was no pretty way out of this peach of a diagnosis.

"Sarah, I know you're scared, but there's no nice way to say these kinds of things. Should we proceed with the surgery?"

He was hopeful, determined and self-sacrificing; this made him a good doctor. Not only that but he was also a good looking doctor; a dark-haired, tall man, with a defined jaw and cleft who was obviously the dream boy of every girl during his school days. He was still young, maybe in his thirties?

Including her doctor's hotness, everything but the painful subject before her could come to mind. Trapped and thoughtless, Sarah sat in silence. Staring at the wall behind her neurologist.

"…Would you like a referral to another hospital? A second and third opinion is never discouraged when such…. " His pen moved up to his face and he stuck the end into his cleft thoughtfully, searching for the right words. "…'Delicate' organs are to be operated on."

She let strands of her dark bangs fall into her face, to hide the embarrassment in her green eyes. Not one concept he had stated made it into her brain. The only thing she heard was that lovely word. Malignant. But now her silence was making him think she didn't like him as her doctor.

"N-no, I trust you." Her dad would kill her for not getting other opinions. Something in Dr. Fellman's eyes made her feel safe, like he wouldn't let anything happen to her.

"Well then, would you like to schedule surgery and chemo? We can set up both schedules right now. I'm not going to let you go through this alone." Blue eyes seared into her, she could melt into a puddle on the floor right then. He knew that she did not willingly come to her weekly visits alone.

It took a split second to pull her puddle-brain together and form words, "Could you let me think it over and talk to my parents? I'll call to make the appointments when I figure this all out in my head…"

Dr. Fellman gave her a knowing look, as if he had done this a thousand times. A look that told her that she was doomed. No matter how hopeful he was, he knew this was not the kind of thing people could recover from. She was not going to last too much longer. Her tumor was about the size of an egg with flanges that interwove themselves throughout her medulla and cerebellum. Two more, smaller, tumors were lying within her Sylvain fissure and deep within the frontal lobe. Chemotherapy was going to be miserable, and so was surgery. She was going to become sicker and sicker each day until the cancer was eradicated. If it ever did leave her body. Surgery was to relieve some of the pressure on her brain and to remove one of the smaller tumors. If she survived it, she only had a slow drip of poison to wake up to for unendurably painful radiation therapy.

Sarah thought a lot about her own demise lately, ever since the headaches started.

She was watching Toby when the first blackout happened. He was a cute kid, eight years old. Big blue eyes, a tousled mess of blonde curls on top of his head. Karen liked to keep his hair long, but both Sarah and Toby liked it short. It brought out his perfectly blue eyes. They had been at the park with her friends, a weekly outing for some kind of adventure. That day it had been a trip for ice cream. They were enjoying the last of a lingering few beautiful, sunny days of autumn. She looked up through the few green leaves left, most of them were reds or browns and on the ground decaying. The sunlight hit her eyes forcefully, pushing her eyeballs into their sockets. Into her skull. Or so it felt like.

Her head bounced off of the surprisingly hard clay-like ground.

Toby dropped his ice cream cone and ran to her, the others followed. Vibrating footsteps climaxed a crescendo of throbbing pain she felt through the ground.

"Sar, are you okay?" Voices echoed through her head until they faded into the overwhelming darkness.

When she came around, Sarah endured a long series of migraines. Looking up from the hard, and slightly moist, ground she saw beyond her friends' faces that a storm front was coming. Maybe she had a sinus infection and the pain was brought on by the pressure change. This thought was a weak flutter in the back of her delicate mind, there was an ominous feeling within. There was more to this dizzy spell than she ever wanted to think.

The nauseating dizzy spells had been coming more and more frequently over the past two months. Lightning flashes throughout her body began a few weeks after. She would lose her senses. She would be unable to see clearly. Finally, her father made her go to the emergency room.

Mount Sinai Hospital is where she ended up in the end. Her journey, starting at Saint Barnabas in New Jersey, made a fine tour of the hospitals of New England. Sinai had the best neurosurgeons in the area. It was there where she learned how dire her situation truly was.

She had stage-four brain cancer.

Of this she was sure. After over a month of brain imaging, she came to that understanding. Those big blue plastic sheets with pictures of her mutilated brain on them caused a sweeping, cold feeling throughout her arms and legs. She did not want to admit the diagnosis to her heart. It burned, the truth. The pain swept through and her world crumbled down. But no one was here for her like she had always imagined these kinds of moments.

After the first few doctor visits her family stopped going with her. As if her pain was too much. Too much for them to bear with her.

She drove home with tears threatening to spill over, listening to whatever was on the radio. Not bothering to change it when a bad song came blaring over her broken, tinny sounding speakers. She opened the windows and popped a Percocet, chasing with one of the endless bottles of water she had in the car.

'_I'm __not__ addicted, my head just hurts_.' At least that's what she told herself. Three full bottles of the addictive pain-killer in one month was a little excessive. Not to mention, this was a long drive to go alone with nothing but your thoughts. The drugs were probably a bad idea for such a long, lonesome drive.

About a four-hour commute from the hospital to her home. Her friends used to come with her, visit her when she needed to stay over night. Then the school year started and she was shut out. A phone call every once in a while to ask her well-being. Sarah hated answering those banal calls. Were her so-called friends honest people, they would just shoot her a text asking if she was dead yet. Morbid curiosity, that was their only true reason for contacting her.

Her college was giving her a leave of absence so she could potentially get better. Rutgers University had given her a partial scholarship for performing arts. She was at the top of her class which didn't give her much time to do anything else. She wrote in her journal and tried to write stories of her own. She didn't like any of them after she writing a few chapters, they didn't precisely capture what she wanted to say.

She had an idea in her head about a rag tag group of friends who work together and defeat an evil king.

Her old friends, Hoggle, Ludo, and Sir Didymus were whom she wished to personify. At least they were her friends until she was a junior in high school. Then they stopped coming to have sleepovers and talk about the lives of goblins and gossip about their omnipotent ruler. She knew, she had met their king, but she could barely remember him. It was like he was erased from her mind. She blamed the tumors.

She remembers their last visit clearly. Hoggle was all put out because his jewels had been stolen from him. There was an underlying mania in his eyes, he was a little too happy to see her. As were the others. After that, she never saw them again.

The red streetlight lit up the tiny droplets of water on her car. They looked like dip-n-dots all over the windshield. When she arrived home, all of the lights were out. She knew Toby would be sleeping; he didn't care for bedtime stories anymore. He was much bigger than he had been during their trials in the labyrinth. As was Sarah. She was a fully formed woman now. Long, dark hair and bright green eyes were the same. But she now adorned long side bangs and a pair of cartilage piercings on her left ear that she had to take out for MRI's.

Her teenaged years had been kind to her. She never had pimples like other people her age and went through the hormone-fueled days gracefully. Boys had always liked her and she had friends. She only had a few boyfriends over the years. But she stopped dating when she was seventeen.

Vomit rose, burning her throat. She blamed the tumors. But she knew what caused her stomach to roil. She didn't think about her high school days anymore and everyone knew not to ask. Dark hair flitted against her cheek from under her knit cap as she fingered through her keys for the one to her front door. A long night was ahead of her. A long night of loss. It was hardly fair. She lost her childhood, and now her future was being ripped from her.


	2. Amygdalas and Owls

_Running through the park with Merlin by her side. Sunlight filtering through flowers and green leaves, creating a patchwork of light that moved across her face. Summers were beautiful here. As she slowed to catch her breath, a faint noise caught Sarah's joyous heart. _

_Hoo-hoo._

_Spinning around toward the bridge and river she saw a feather float down onto a clearing with a picnic blanket down. She recognized that noise. A white barn owl was standing, talons clenched over something small and rectangular. While walking over to it the owl stepped off of it and Sarah was able to identify it, a notebook. She picked it up with her eyes level with the large bird, to be sure it wouldn't try and take it. She traced her fingers over the knotted wooden cover. It was a dark grained wood with an intricate knotted pattern framing the cover. The pattern looked to have been burned into the surface. It was someone's journal. _

_She glanced at the owl wearily and opened to the first page._

"_Dear diary,_

_If I only had a brain._

_J."_

_The handwriting was a flowing script with a sharp, artistic touch. She looked up from the book to see the white bird silently flapping away. It then burst into feathers. As they fell, the form of a man took shape where the bird once was. White blonde, and wild hair. A dark cloak and black tights, and very tall. His face was terrifyingly familiar. He looked at her with meaning and deliberately held up one finger to his lips-_

Sarah awoke with a start. Her mouth was open, like she had been in the middle of a conversation. Staring at the ceiling, she recounted her dream. That man was no longer a guest in her dreams, but a permanent fixture. She knew she would see him whenever she closed her eyes. But _why_ is he in her head? Did she make him up? What was that dream telling her? If it meant anything significant, it beat the Hell out of her.

Her room was cold and her toes were particularly chilly. Hospital socks could fix that. She got out of bed and got into comfortable sweats.

As she went to put on her makeup for the day, she looked into the mirror hoping that by some miracle her friends would see how much she needed them. She wanted to see them so badly. Something must have happened. There was no way they would leave her at a time like this.

Her next move was to call the hospital to schedule the surgery. She had spoken to her father about it briefly. He wanted her to do anything and everything that would make this go away.

The screen of her phone went black.

Two days. Her surgery was in two days. Surgeries were never scheduled that quickly. Sarah felt like she was in a T.V. show where the tragically beautiful main character dies terribly while her long lost lover cries for her. Minus the long lost lover. And minus the tragically beautiful.

She spent her days going for walks and trying to keep herself together through writing her thoughts or reading books. Maybe she would be the next Kurt Cobain. Once she died all of her writing would become heartbreakingly important.

She did nothing these days. Her dad didn't want her to become stressed and therefore die faster. She did have a job over the summer, before all of this. She and her friend Andi waitressed at a pizza joint in town called Ralph's. It was decent enough money, but she couldn't stay on her feet long enough for the hours anymore.

She knew she needed to stay positive and keep her head up to beat the cancer.

"Much easier said than done." She whispered to herself as she plopped next to a tree with a book.

The Labyrinth had always been her favorite book. She got to remind herself that she really was that heroin. The girl in the book was not fictional anymore.

Each day she felt like that strong girl she had been was slipping further and further from her grasp. What kept her strong now was Toby. She needed to stay around and keep him from becoming a self-centered beast like his mother.

Even that was barely a good reason anymore. Her dreams were what truly fueled her.

She would dream about a beautiful ballroom. About a beautiful man and that seductively velvet voice of his. He seemed so… _important_.

She feared she wouldn't see him again if she died. It was a strange thing. She had this affinity toward a person she had never truly known. He was the answer to all of her needs. He was callous and sarcastic enough to keep her interested but beautiful and giving when she needed it. Yet, she knew these things were created in her own head. She was setting herself up for disaster if she ever dated someone who was not up to her, now very high, expectations.

Alas, he was not real.

…Was he?

In her head he had no name, just a beautiful nonexistence.

Those two days prior to surgery went by quickly. _Too quickly_, Sarah thought as she wrote a note backwards and taped it to her mirror before she left on her four-hour journey for the 7:05am surgery. She knew her friends probably would not get to read her short letter, but it felt good to try and make contact. At 4am she reached the hospital. Her father drove her, but he would not be able to stay for the whole event. He told her how much he loved her and that he would see her when she got out.

As the nurses prepped her, she took a final look at her hair. She would probably never look this way again. Dr. Fellmen walked in and held her hand through the process. He squeezed her shoulder when one tall nurse took out shears and an electric razor. As pathetic as she felt, she knew it wasn't wrong of her to cry as they cut it all off. She looked down at the plastic bag on the ground, catching her waist length hair. A tear dripped off of her nose and into the bag.

The doctor recommended that she not look at the little handheld mirror she was offered, but, being strong headed as she was, she needed to see the damage. She had only eyebrows and some purple marker on her scalp. Now, she looked the part of the quickly dying 22 year old who once had oh so much promise. Dr. Fellmen and the nurse helped her onto a gurney and pushed her to the operating room.

Just as the surgeon injected her with painkillers, Sarah felt the world fall away. Not so much that she was unaware, but enough that she would not remember much. She then made a subconsciously silent, pleading, dying wish that only the right person would be able to hear. She whispered softly, before her mind went entirely blank.

"…Jareth."

Hours later she was picked up like a china doll and placed into a new gurney. Although she had not felt a thing, she knew that a surgeon's scalpel had just been toying around with her brain. As soon as her skull was opened a feeling of freedom swept through her body. Her constant headache was finally gone!

She was required to stay semi-conscious during the procedure so she could answer questions. This was done to ensure the doctor didn't damage any important functions. She did not notice any difference in her thinking, much. Only that she felt like her mind was power walking through oatmeal.

A pair of nurses lifted her onto a bed in a private recovery room. They reinserted the I.V. and let her stay in the room alone. Her handheld mirror was on the chair next to her. Black out curtains were drawn since it was mid afternoon. The assumption being that Sarah should sleep after a 10-hour surgery.

All was quiet and she had finally progressed into a nearly sleeping state. That is, until a flourish of purple light and a metallic clang emitted from the bathroom. Her eyes flew open and stared. Opening her ears, listening for anything else.

'A bulb probably burst.' She thought before closing her eyes.

A creaking sound radiating from the bathroom was what awoke her next. Groggily, she opened her eyes and looked to the source of the noise. The bathroom door was now open. Logically, she knew that couldn't have happened, but her drugged brain made sense of it. Blaming the wind or something.

What she didn't seem to notice as she crashed deep into sleep was that someone watched over her. A dream-like individual stood in the shadows, gloved hands in tight, angry fists.


	3. Nightmares

Looking through a crystal, he watched over his kingdom. He always laughed at their absolute stupidity. One of the only redeeming qualities of being Goblin King was the entertainment value. Jareth spent his day in the usual manner. Giving rulings based on personal judgment and ensuring the safety of his subjects. Making it rain in areas of need and considering possible wishes to be bestowed on humans. He heard them in his head; sometimes he realized how insane he looked when a particularly ridiculous wish came through. He would hear intolerably senseless wishes and couldn't help but look to the nearest goblin and ask why humans were so absent minded.

Of course goblins were no better. They wanted for the same silly things as humans. But goblins understood that words have meaning. Wishes Aboveground were thrown around like they were some kind of joke. But the Goblin King did not find their sense of humor amusing. Words meant more than mere conversation Underground. They had real impact on the environment and the Goblin King himself.

This is why it was such a surprise when he heard a familiar voice call his name. At first he shook it off, there was no one who would call him by his given name. Not everyone knew his name, particularly no humans. Only one.

He went about his day but the tension inside of him grew unbearable. The curiosity. Why would she call to him now? _How_ could she call to him?

He considered ignoring her plea, his anger toward her was a tight coil that could spring up and explode at any moment in her presence. Defeat affected him more greatly than she could begin to comprehend.

He cast a spell on her when she left the Underground. She would dream of him every night as his own personal form of torment. The shadow he created for these dreams was meant to make her feel weak, to make her feel inadequate. Of course, every now and again Jareth would make a real appearance to see how she was handling it. These dreams were created to make her want to give up life's dreams. But, what began as a punishment for defeating his labyrinth now became the bane of his existence.

She always excelled beyond his expectations. In school, sports, drama, and relationships. She wanted to prove to this deterring and callous version of himself that she was strong. She wanted to be tougher, more willful than him; even in her dreams. He had decided that he would not see her anymore about six years ago when he learned something terrible through those dreams.

Jareth shook his head. Feeling white blond hair fall like soft rain over his shoulders, he drove that darkness from his mind. He chose not to think about these things for they only infuriated him.

But now, the despair in her voice told him that this was vital. He once made a promise to himself: allow her to live without magic. This little rule could only be overlooked if she was endangering herself or others. He conjured a crystal and tried to find her so he could decide if the situation was dire enough for an intervention.

His face whitened at the sight.

Sarah was not alone; and she was awake, but not exactly. She was undergoing some major procedure. Every part of her body was covered by white cloth aside from her face and head. Part of her skull was separated from her head and a surgeon was pulling a bloody mass from the opening.

A long, erratic noise pierced through the crystal and he saw doctors rushing throughout the scene. One doctor pushed a tube down her throat and squeezed a blue bag lightly, speaking rushed words to another person in green scrubs. The noise went away and a regular pulse resumed. Jareth's eyes widened, then closed tightly in frustration. He unwittingly crushed the crystal in his hand, causing a hot drip of blood to fall from his palm, pooling by his feet.

6 years… he avoided her for 6 years only to find her in this condition. Why hadn't she asked for him sooner? If she hadn't been so stubborn he could have fixed this before it began.

Jareth looked down at his now mostly healed left hand, then down to his right. There stood a waist high goblin with a moldy helmet atop his head. The king reached out a hand and lifted the creature by its neck easily to his own height so he could look into its eyes and shook its body slightly.

"Why must she always make things so difficult!"

...

Now he looked down at his nemesis from the side of her hospital bed with fists clenched and eyes narrowed. He was angry with her. Why was she so damn obstinate? At first he thought he misheard his name, whispered in a fragile plea. That voice that called to him was so utterly desperate. He needed to do something.

Looking at her now he wondered how on earth he let her win the Labyrinth. When he first looked upon her, he was shocked by her appearance. But the image didn't do her appearance justice. The crystal made her seem far healthier than reality.

She was a waif-like creature. Deathly thin with tubes and fluid bags hanging all over, deep blue and purple bruises under her eyes and dried blood seeping through part of the large strips of bandages, which created an ugly, bleeding turban of sorts.

Sarah had some sort of power over him. He felt obligated to do whatever she asked of him. He even lowered himself to climbing through a bathroom window to see what she needed. Over the years he distanced himself from the girl, thinking that her friends from the Underground would help her if she needed it. She was strong and independent; even if she needed help she wouldn't want to ask for it.

A few years ago he had finally come to the conclusion that the dreams weren't enough of a punishment. They were backfiring.

That terrible thought crossed his mind again. His insides twisted, he couldn't believe she could dream something so disturbing. _That day_ she had looked nearly as bad as she did right now in this bed. He did not know, nor did he want to know the details. _Ever_. But he knew it had occurred and found that her so-called 'friends' didn't protect her like he'd asked of them.

Sir Didymus was the only one of the trio who had attempted to do anything, so he was spared the fate of the others. He warned them that they could only see her once more because of their cowardice in the face of true danger. They did, and pretended like everything was fine. When, of course, _nothing_ was fine.

Hog Brain and Ludo had been in an oubliette ever since.

The Goblin King looked down at Sarah. With the soft glow from the closed curtain, she was still hauntingly beautiful. With no hair, thin appearance and dark bruising. She could still steal any man's soul just with those green eyes of hers. This was the reason he stayed away from her life. She did not belong in his world, nor could he stay in hers.

It was so, oh, how he hated the term, _unfair_.

Being Aboveground greatly decreased his ability to use magic. Magic was not used near humans often, they did not understand. Immortals from below became mortal for however long they were above. Aging and becoming sick were not uncommon side effects of the polluted air here. He already felt the consequences; he would not be able to stay long.

Silently as an owl's wings, he picked up Sarah's mirror and placed it on her lap. He could try to communicate with her. There was a moment when he considered staying until she awoke, to tell her everything outright. But he knew how detrimental that could be to each of them. With her in this state, he could not justify it.

Pop! A crystal appeared in his hand. A dream sequence was inside, tailor made for this occasion. Before he left, Jareth blew on the crystal lightly and it floated over to Sarah's bed. It stopped next to her bandages and popped against her forehead.

* * *

_A/N: Thank you all so, so much for the support. You are all lovely people. I have to say, it gives me a little anxiety to update this story because of how many people like it. I'm not used to working with established characters so I can only hope that I'm doing them justice. I'm so afraid of sinking below your expectations! Many apologies for taking so long for this chapter, I had to get married and buy a house. Those things can take a chunk out of your free time, for sure! _


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